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| Claire Lynch (photo: Neeq Serene) |
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Claire Lynch has a doctorate from the University of Oxford and has spent her career as a Professor of English. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post and on BBC Radio, and she is the author of the memoir Small: On Motherhoods (2021). Lynch lives in Windsor, England, with her wife and three daughters. A Family Matter, Lynch's debut novel, will be published by Scribner on June 3, 2025.
Was there one event or concept that served as the genesis for the book?
It started with two characters, Heron and Maggie, a father and daughter who are both incredibly close and extremely closed off all at once. I was interested too in the idea of anticipated grief, the knowledge that pain is on the horizon, while needing to carry on as usual in the meantime. I started out just writing about their dynamic, imagining all the small interactions between them, the habits that have formed over a lifetime. It was only when I started to really ask myself where Maggie's mother had gone that the rest of the story started to emerge.
We've all had that feeling of wanting to escape--to not face what lies ahead. But Heron does escape in the opening scene, at least for a few moments. How did you arrive at that particular escape route?
I secretly suspect that any parent who has wrangled a crying baby through a supermarket has let this idea cross their mind! It seems to me that most of us engage with the most profound moments of our lives in utterly mundane environments. We hear the worst news (and the best) in hospital corridors, in car parks, while sitting at our desks. It's absolutely central to Heron's character that, even when he gets bad news from the doctor, he still goes ahead with his weekly food shop. His moment of escape is really the ultimate refusal to deal with the news and its consequences. Nothing says, "No, not today thank you" quite like hiding in a freezer!
[This scene] establishes Heron's generally cautious personality by showing us his one moment of recklessness. It also allowed me to gently open up the idea that, despite what Maggie thinks, he doesn't always give her the full picture.
There's a related, earlier incident where Heron wanted to escape/freeze--during his divorce hearings, while sitting in the park on a lunch break.
I do see a connection between the two. In both, there's a powerlessness, or perhaps more accurately, a failure to recognise the power he does have. Both moments are an abdication of responsibility in a way, but they might more generously be seen as a freeze response to traumatic experiences. It's revealing that in both of these moments in the novel Heron defers to authority figures, a lawyer and a doctor. I think it's clear that Heron's sense of his place in these power structures has a huge impact on how he behaves.
What prompted you to structure the book this way, 40 years apart?
Give or take a few years, Maggie and I are the same age. I found that hugely useful in terms of shaping some of the practical details of her early childhood, what she likes to eat, or wear, the toys she plays with. The same is true of her as a mother. She's not a version of me in any way, but I do have some sympathy with her when she has to manage ferrying the children to endless sporting events at the same time as quietly managing an identity crisis!
As I started to research the history around these cases, I felt very keenly the shift in social attitudes, as well as the quite different legal realities, across that 40-year period. I thought a lot about how Maggie would have to make sense of this, not as something historical and distanced, but as personally relevant.
Certainly, Heron's prognosis creates a deadline which sets things in motion. I also took real care over the way the news comes out. After all, Heron doesn't actually broach the topic until Maggie finds out the truth on her own. It's left up to the reader to decide if he would have told her himself.
There was something lovely about knowing these characters at two different periods of the family's life. The trickier part was accounting for all the time we don't witness in between. Although people obviously change across that length of time, we had to recognise them all the way through. Heron, Maggie, and Dawn are all 40 years older between one part of the story and the next, but they are still themselves.
Even though readers know the truth of the circumstances surrounding her parents' divorce before Maggie does, you manage to create suspense surrounding how events will unfold.
I think the structure was very helpful on this front, allowing me to cut away from one time frame just as some new aspect is revealed to us. Perhaps this is an indication of my cowardice as a reader, but I really enjoy the kind of suspense where I know essentially what happened, but I can't yet imagine how or why. There's also something about letting readers come to an understanding in the same way Maggie does. There's a chance to mull over things as new information emerges. Time, even, to wonder what we might have done in the same circumstances.
All of your characters are fully formed, and you create readers' sympathy around each--even Heron, who could easily have come off as a villain. Can you say more about why it was important to evoke empathy for Heron?
It was really important to me that there wouldn't be a "bad guy" as such. If it's not too grandiose a claim, I wanted the novel to ask questions about the recent past, to remind us how quickly attitudes can change, in multiple directions. By his own present-day standards, Heron's earlier behaviour is rigid and based on prejudice. But taken in the context of the time and place, his decision is, frankly, unremarkable. He takes the advice of professionals, he acts according to the rules, written and otherwise. None of this is to excuse his actions, by any means. Quite the opposite really. Heron's discussion with Tom is so important because it might even be taken as a guiding principle in the book. It goes without saying that we are all shaped by the time and place in which we live--the point is that the time and the place don't remain constant. Ultimately, I think we have sympathy for Heron because he is able to recognise this, and because he is willing to respond and change. His actions in 1982 are, hard as it is for us to understand now, genuinely well-intentioned, even if the consequences are devastating.
You have a way of capturing a character in just a phrase or the barest observation. Do you write a draft and then pare back and pare back?
I have always been very cynical of writers saying that their characters "speak" to them so you can imagine how annoyed I am to find out that it's true! At the stage when I was most deeply involved in writing the novel, I absolutely felt that I knew them all, what they would think, how they spoke, in a way which was actually quite disarming. Sometimes phrases would come to me as I was driving and I would think, "Ah, yes, that's exactly what Conor would say if he was stuck in this traffic."
You're exactly right about the paring back. I had, for example, written quite a bit about Maggie's job, what she does, who she works with, what the office building is like, all of it. When I re-write and edit, it becomes clear which sections have served a purpose for me but don't now serve the novel. I cut them and hope readers are left with an understanding of how Maggie feels about work, where it fits into her hierarchy of many responsibilities, without being bogged down in a description of her co-workers. Again, to risk a cliché, those deleted layers are somehow still there, holding it all up. --Jennifer M. Brown